Whenever I (frequently) feel like I’m not great at parenting, I should remember that Tesfa couldn’t wait until tomorrow to go to the bookstore to pick out her yay-I-finished-grade-one present and insisted that we go today.

Also migraine. So here is my migraine whine: whine.

One day I opened by email to a message thanking me for agreeing to review Bent by Teri Louise Kelly. I looked around my give-me-free-books sites (librarything, goodreads, netgalley), but I’m pretty sure I never requested this book to review. Oh well. I’m never going to turn down a free book — like the time I got an M.G. Vassanji book randomly in the mail. That was pretty nice.

Okay, but Teri Louise Kelly is no M.G. Vassanji. We have here a rambling and meandering treatise on gender, transgender, drugs, life, writing, poetry, Australia, more drugs, drinking, vomit, first person POV, second person POV, etc., etc., etc. Most of the philosophical component is roughly equivalent to that guy you knew in high school who totally understood Nietzsche and spent a lot of time talking about reality while getting stoned. The gender thoughts are about as deep and very essentialized (girls like makeup, boys like sports!) although there is some glimmer of depth nearer to the end when Teri seems to get away from trying to be one gender or the other, and becomes, in eir words, undefinable. But that’s a long road (or read) to get there. Like like Teri trying on different aspects of different genders, this book tries on a bunch of roles: memoir, theory, fiction, experiment, manifesto. Maybe Teri is satisfied with the gender construct e’s built for eirself, but Bent doesn’t really come up with anything satisfying. It’s like reading Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal without the depth, and even a sprinkling of pithy bon-mots can’t elevate Bent to where it needs to be to be truly transcendent.

And I feel bad for Teri’s kids, not because of Teri’s experimentation with gender, but because e seems to walk away from them without compunction. Obviously, it isn’t Teri’s place to say how eir kids feel, but the flippancy with which Teri discusses eir disinterest in eir kids speaks to the way the book lacks an emotional core. It makes Teri seem selfish. It makes Teri less relatable. If there’d been some sort of self-awareness or critique of eir own actions, then maybe it could be understandable, but treating one’s decision to abandon one’s family as glib and inconsequential in eir path to become the undefinable person she is, is unconscionable.

Also, you know what’s boring, let me tell you about this dream I had last night boring: pages and pages of reading about someone getting pissed or high or wasted again and again and again. Other people’s altered consciousness stories are boring. I wish the editors had cut most of the drugged out bits (as well as invested in a proof-reader to catch a bunch of little grammar and punctuation errors throughout).

I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the right person to review this book. I have no set philosophy on gender. In an hour, I can go from a liberal feminist interpretation of gender to a radical feminist one to a post-modern interpretation to anarchic. I’m muddled. Bent didn’t unmuddle me, but that was hardly its aim. Bent reminds me of some conversations I had with autoethnographers a while ago where the importance is the student’s writing of their own story, rather than necessarily the content or the style in which the student writes. I could see studiers of gender analysing Bent for background or colour, but I can’t really say it succeeds as a mainstream memoir. But, then again, maybe that isn’t the point.

I received a copy free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.